PTAB authority pushes court litigation to settlements, easing case burdens.
Jaffna et al. ’16 [Sam Jaffna is director of analytics, Shawn Ambwani is chief operating officer, Jonathan Stroud is chief patent counsel and Robert Jain is an IP analyst at Unified Patents; 2/1/2016; IAM; “How PTAB proceedings are driving district court settlements,” https://www.iam-media.com/article/how-ptab-proceedings-are-driving-district-court-settlements]//LASA-AB
In the initial months after the enactment of the America Invents Act, little was known about how the newly crafted post-grant procedures would affect patent litigation in federal district court. As the clouds parted and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued its first decisions, new beacons have emerged which are altering the way that parties navigate patent litigation. In particular, the decision to institute review has become a rising star of the PTAB, with its gravitational pull reaching beyond just “real parties in interest”, but also warping the litigation fabric for surrounding “related matters”.
Previous commentators have addressed a variety of statistics and trends at the PTAB, including institution, invalidity, settlement rates and district court stays. This study explores the PTAB’s ripple effects in district court and shows that there is a correlation between litigation settlement timings and PTAB institution decisions, even for defendants which are not real parties to the PTAB proceedings.
Our analysis focuses on district court litigation:
filed between January 1 2012 and December 31 2014;
that would have been identified as pending related matters in at least one inter partes review petition; and
that was likely settled as of November 1 2015.
Further, this analysis focuses only on inter partes reviews, which comprise more than 90% of all petitions filed at the PTAB. We show that, for the approximately 1,100 cases which fit this profile, the majority had settled within 180 days of the inter partes review petition filing date. We also explore plausible explanations for this trend and discuss its consequences.